“Art is entertainment,” he said.

Bruce’s “Aunt Matilda’s Americana” show opened at BluSeed Studios last week and showcases about 40 of his sculptures. He has the wooden picket fence rigged up to a Clapper sound-activated switch, so anyone at the show can stop or start the motor at whim.

Bruce is a diversified sculptor, working with a wide range of materials — wood, motors, metal, glass, paint, light, cotton balls and neon.

Neon is an urban medium, Bruce said, born out of industrialization and science, but its function is largely still blue-collar — the voice of of bar lights and advertising.

Daniel Bruce said art, to him, is entertainment. His 40-or-so sculptures currently being shown at BluSeed Studios are interactive, creative and vibrant. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

“My work has always had this dialectic between urban and rural,” he said.

This can be seen in the framing for a collection of photo prints he made in 2019, also titled “Aunt Matilda’s Americana.” In the windowsills of the gallery are photos of celebrities, dogs and landscapes, printed in ink on 120-grit sandpaper, matted in New York City pizza boxes and framed in Adirondack barn wood.

There’s a tension in Bruce’s work between high-brow and low-brow art, which embraces and rejects both.

Bruce grew up on farmland here — his father was a builder, his mom was a hairdresser. He said he didn’t realize the aesthetic value of this area until he moved away from it. His resume includes training at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Rhode Island School of Design, Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica.

Bruce has spent the last 18 years in New York City, but four months ago, he moved back to his hometown of Saranac Lake. He said he was spinning his wheels in New York City and needed to get out.

Daniel Bruce peers into the neon glow of one of his sculptures currently being shown at BluSeed Studios, a collection of lily pads inside an industrial drum. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

Now he’s starting over. His studio is his father’s garage. This is where he created his latest work — the sign advertising the “Aunt Matilda’s Americana” show, which is done in the Adirondack style of woodworking. Of course, he said, he had to go overboard and throw all these twigs on it, go over the top and add some “camp.”

Walking into the gallery is like stepping inside the cabin of an eccentric aunt.

“It’s like a giant cabinet of curiosity,” Bruce said.

It looks like many different artists contributed to this show. That’s the result of his varied interests in material. Not only do his sculptures mash up sundry materials, they mash up cultural signifiers, as well.

“It’s an investigation of gay culture as it relates to American folk art,” Bruce wrote in his artist statement.

This giant fishing lure is one of the many oversized sculptures Daniel Bruce is showing at BluSeed Studios currently. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

“As a gay man, being part of that community and expressing gay identities and concerns and struggles within the artwork, was important to me,” Bruce said.

Opening the door to an intricate church-shaped-mailbox, viewers can see two groomsmen standing at the alter at the other end. One of the photos printed on sandpaper is the gay film director John Waters as a boy. A barber’s pole bears pride colors. The structural poles in the upstairs room hold oversized air fresheners boasting the scents of coffee, sawdust, gasoline, manure and bleach. Bruce calls these the “scents of prescribed masculinity.”

Even the title of the show, “Aunt Matilda,” is gay slang, Bruce said — a term one gay man might use to describe another.

This means the title of the show could be read in two ways. It could be seen as a literal Aunt Matilda, a fictional character — her collection of Americana. Or it could be Aunt Matilda, the artist, their take on Americana.

Bruce’s sculptures look at and draw from premodern, modern and postmodern art.

Folk art dates back to the premodern art tradition. Recontextualizing household items as art is a post-modern convention. Bruce said one of modern art’s values is about producing something “so shiny and well-made that it’s making almost disappears.” The process of creating it is irrelevant. It just exists.

In the back corner of the gallery stands a supersized fish-shaped white wine bottle — 6 feet tall. Bruce said he spent around a year sanding, painting and sculpting it. But, he added, thousands of the regular-sized bottled have been cranked out over the years.

“The inviting luster of smoothly painted wooden facsimiles speaks to the divide between the handmade and the mass-produced,” he wrote in his artist statement.

He uses modern tools — like CNC routers — but also employs good-old fashioned elbow grease.

“I embrace both tradition and emerging technologies to illuminate the manufactured disparity between high and low culture,” Bruce wrote in his artist statement.

His work is rooted in the philosophical and critical, but it takes humor as an avenue to get there.

Bruce said he became tired of art that is “shocking” for the sake of being shocking. He prefers the type of shock that elicits curiosity and joy.

“I like things to be humorous. I like people to be able to get a kick out of something,” Bruce said.

There are several interactive elements of this show, calling back to Bruce’s childhood hobbies.

In his youth, he collected smashed pennies — throwing change into those machines at museums, tourist sites and landmarks that stretch, flatten and stamp pennies with slogans and designs.

He loved the exclusivity of having a penny that would only be crafted at the Grand Canyon, as well as the engaging process of smashing the pennies.

“You were an active participant in the changing of this penny,” he said.

Visitors to the gallery should bring loose change of their own, because for 25 cents they can get their fortune told by a rock. On the stage in the back of the gallery is a “fortune-telling boulder” that takes quarters.

Bruce said it was a group effort to make this sculpture. Family and friends helped with the music, electrical workings and assembly. He essentially was a “manager” for the project, he said. But that’s the way artists work. Artists use the world, he said. None of this is possible without the whole world. He said he was thankful for the people who invented plywood, the people who cut the boards, the people who delivered it and sold it. His work relied on people all up and down the supply chain, all over the world.

Bruce said sculpture is the “bastard child” of the art world, but he loves it.

On one wall are around a dozen massive keys, each with a unique key chain. Bruce said he began a habit of noticing people’s key chains in New York City. Key chains are a cheap and functional accessory, he said. They’re not taken seriously but are all key parts of self-expression.

“By employing mundane materials like wood, sandpaper and metal, the selected works speak to a tradition of sculptural construction while also remarking on the transformation of everyday objects into something more,” he wrote. “The often-overlooked realms of folk art and belief, as well as the diminished history and signifiers of queer society act as touchstones for a deeper consideration of masculinity, politics, mythologies and the place of consumerism in American society.”

“Aunt Matilda’s Americana” opened on March 4 and will run until April 23. There will be a closing reception on April 23 at 5 p.m. when Bruce will be at the gallery to speak with attendees. The BluSeed gallery is open from 2 to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday.